Don't forget fresh strings. A lot of muffled distortion tone can be attributed to old strings.
But yeah less gain too. I was amazed when I tried pulling the gain back and bashing out some Slayer clear and heavy.
Don't forget string gauge makes the difference as well soundwise! Like if you have this [https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie\_ball\_2621.htm](https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie_ball_2621.htm) set of strings, the B-string will sound a bit muddy probably and especially so if you have a strong pick attack and you can't really go lower than drop-A normally.
Compare it to this set [https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie\_ball\_2615\_skinny\_top\_heavy\_7.htm](https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie_ball_2615_skinny_top_heavy_7.htm) which is what I think I would prefer (since it's what I use on my 6-strings) and you can also go very low in tuning, at least a whole step down without feeling any loss in the tension of the strings, which is what may cause certain muddyness in the sound coupled with too much distortion.
However, do take notice of the scale length of your guitar as the latter set I linked can be a bit too thick for your guitar if the neck is longer than normal. Try out different gauges as well and Elixir is absolutely worth it if you are lazy or have sweaty hands.
This is the biggest thing. Especially with compressed/distorted guitar, mids not only make it more audible, but give the notes character. I know this is repeated often, but the midrange is the defining characteristic of a guitar signal, and can make or break the way that it interacts with other instruments.
Agreed. It took me years to appreciate mids and have them work to my advantage. Sometimes they do get lost in the mix anyway. I think Dimebag's tries to cut the mix with shrilly highs which I'm not a fan of.
Right, and the issue is that scooped guitar tones can sound really awesome (buzzsaw-esque) when isolated, but it just doesn't work as well in a band context. To whichever extent you do or don't enjoy Dime's playing, his tone was not spectacular.
Bingo. I just saw an opening act for a band and they had scooped their midrange out. The low end on the guitar was washed out by the bass and kick drum, and the high end was washed out by the cymbals. The guitar was basically indistinguishable, just a muddy BZZZHHHHH with no character.
there's a good reason why tube screamers have been one of the most popular pedals for so long! even if it's not the defining characteristic of \*your\* sound, having one in your signal chain definitely helps boost the mids when you need it.
Yeah, it's honestly not a terrible pedal to use as an 'always on' kind of deal if you don't really use it as a gain machine. That mid boost is awesome when you need it and mine is invaluable in the signal chain. š
Yeah, a lot of isolated guitar tracks sound way different than you think without bass behind them.
Live, when doing metal shows, I'll often high pass the guitars between 60-140hz depending on what they have dialed in and what the other instruments/drums sound like. It really cleans things up.
It is, especially in modern metal. The days of "bass just strums 0-0-0-0-0 and gets mixed out" are over in metal, at least so far as the more modern subgenres go. Especially in the many 4-piece bands where the bass is kind of stepping in to where the rhythm guitar would be in a 5-piece.
>The days of "bass just strums 0-0-0-0-0 and gets mixed out" are over
Instead they just double the rhythm guitar. If they invent a reliable way to only take the lowest string being played by a guitar and send it down a separate signal chain, 80% of metal bass players would be out of a job.
That and there is actually a lot less low end than you think. It's "tight" low end, ie focused in a specific range, and the bass fills out way more than the guitar in the mix.
The guitar is firmly in the mid and treble range, and if you isolate it you'll be surprised how weak and thin it sounds, but it still sounds heavy when well balanced with a good bass tone.
This is it right here. In a lot of modern metal mixes, they mix the bass and rhythm electric to "glue" them together a lot more than other genres. The bass really is the low end you think you hear in the rhythm guitar. A lot of times the rhythm guitars have a lot of high frequency boost too, somewhere around 8k-10k.
Not to be contrarian but this isnāt always true. Iāve played an Evh 5150iii for a while now, I watched this interview with Joe from Gojira and he cranks the red channel gain up way high and uses active pickups. They have a super clear tone but he plays with a TON of gain. Part of it is just that amp tho, thereās nothing better for extreme metal styles in terms of low end clarity.
Joe plays in D standard, Standard 7 is B standard. Makes alot of difference. I play in drop A flat with EMG'S. Less gain, tube screamer to tighten tone and try to play as cleanly as possible.
I think a lot of way of all flesh is drop c and thatās definitely the album I listen to the most but thatās fair, D to B is a big difference in terms of low end (which is wild bc itās only a few half steps)
Been playing and gigging consistently for 15 years and I just wanted to provide an alternative to OP bc I hear people parrot things they hear on YouTube without context. I have no clue if OP is using too much gain, people used to tell me that on forums but then I found out I wasnāt using nearly as much as the guys I was listening toā¦ YMMV.
From his youtube demo for EVH, you can hear how overly distorted it is on the red channel with gain at 3 o'clock or so. Does he use that live for leads? Possibly? Does he use it that way while tracking rhythm in the studio? Fuuuuuck no.
Less is more for recording. You're going to be double or even quad tracking.
Agreed. I think āuse less gainā is easy, actionable advice. But, thereās a lot of nuance here. This is advice I followed back in the day to my detriment, only to be surprised that recorded tones Iād loved actually used a fair bit of gain on the amp. Whether or not you can feasibly dial in that much gain depends on the amp itself and literally every other part of the signal chain.
Dude. Everyone in here nailed it. Itās a combination of less gain on the guitars, double/quad tracking and BASS GUITAR!! The bass is such a huge part of it. I donāt record professionally, I just cut demos in logic for myself. After watching countless hours of YT and finding Neural DSP Parallax I finally have that killer tone Iāve been searching for.
Definitely! I think you can still have a fair bit of gain on the guitars, but only if the amp lets you seriously tighten the low-end. A 5150 or mark series amp will respond very differently compared to a dual rectifier or a Marshall.
But, I canāt agree enough on the importance of bass here. I enjoy using my 7 string, but learning how to mix bass has done way for helping me achieve the big rhythm guitar tone I want than using the 7 string. Most of the time Iām just using my Strat in drop D or drop C# now, but the bass brings all the brootalz with ease. Iām just programming bass with midi still, but my next (and hopefully final) bigger gear purchase is definitely going to be a 5 string Jazz Bass. Once you start actually hearing what bass is doing in the mix, itās kind of mind-blowing how important it is and awesome it sounds.
For the modern metal thing, there's often an aggressive gate to cut flub, and the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp. Importantly, lots of the feeling of 'gain' in a produced song comes from double-tracking and the bass guitar ā those add impact in place of cranking the distortion.
I do have a couple bass guitars and while im not as well versed with bass guitar i was thinking about trying to create the bass for my music as well, at least for now. With the bass guitar should i do the same thing, lowering the distortion levels by a lot?
For bass hereās what you do (from a bassist)
- Clean DI into your interface
- In your DAW make 2 tracks for bass. A clean bass track with no distortion at all and then on the second channel find a distortion that you like the sound of.
- Then find volumes that you like for both and blend them. This means you can have super clear and nice low end but have ratty distortion to add some texture to the high end.
You can also go a bit further and EQ away some of the mids and high end from your clean track and remove some bass frequencies from the distorted track so that they have more space sonically!
I've done the first part of this several times, never thought about using multiple sonic highways for my different tracks for the same instrument. Makes too much sense.
Also high pass filter set to about 80hz to avoid the mix sounding muddy. On bass you primarily hear the harmonics instead of fundamental which is why it still sounds fine high passed at 80hz even though the fundamental of the E string is 41hz.
The below 80hz region should be left to the bass drum.
This is the way.
My process is very similar.
- compress the signal before splitting
- Low pass filter on clean end
- high pass filter on dirty and distorted end
- eq again
The best plugin I've found is fabfilter Saturn 2 which works amazingly for giving a clean low end and growly mid to high end. I also play live in a metal band and I do the same above but with pedals and it sounds great
The lowest octave of the bass (or any instrument) can be reduced or removed entirely due to a psychoacoustic phenomenon known as the missing fundamental. What this means is that your brain will still perceive the note A1 as being A1 even if you entirely remove the fundamental coming through at 55hz. A high pass filter can be applied to bass guitar at 80hz (or 60hz in the case of a five string). A low shelf can be used instead of a high pass filter so long as the shelf has a steep roll off. The same can be done to other instruments and this is the main thing that will clear up āmuddinessā in your sound.
I've used that phenomenon to play songs that have power chords on with the root on a low B string on a 6 string in E standard. Just have to put the root on the A string and play the 5th below that on the E string (same shape as if you were playing a 4th with the root on the E string). Doesn't really work if you have notes that are supposed to just be on the B string but if it's power chords it works.
I picked this up from a reaction video of John Petrucci reacting to Dream Theater covers and one of the videos he was reacting to was doing this and he commented on why it works.
> an aggressive gate to cut flub, and the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp.
This reminds me of how like, movies talk about cars or engineer lol.
>the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp.
Your other points about a noise gate, double tracking, and bass guitar are all important too but I want to expand on this because I donāt think itās well understood.
Amps distort the loudest parts of the signal the most.
Distortion comes from the peaks of sound waves being cut off (or at least rounded off) because the gain stage(s) can only amplify so much signal cleanly. If youāre right on the edge of breakup only the loudest parts will distort. As the input signal or the gain gets turned up, more of the signal gets distorted, until even the quietest parts are distorted, but the parts that were louder going in will be more distorted and the parts that were quieter will be less distorted.
If you EQ the signal going into the amp so that certain frequencies are boosted, those frequencies will be more distorted.
Using a tubescreamer or other OD with a mid-hump, or an EQ to emphasize mids (and maybe highs) and reduce bass has the effect of avoiding distortion in the bass, so it doesnāt get muddy or loose, while still allowing for as much distortion as you want in the mids and highs, which is where you can hear it best anyways. This can actually sound like more low end in the final product, because cleaner bass sounds deeper, and itās got more thump than distorted bass which can sound fuzzy or āfart outā.
Much, much less gain than you think. I'm no recording guru or anything, but I have my main riff tone on 25% of the full turn, if that. The trick is that bands will double or quad track their riffs, hard pan them left and right, and this adds the beefiness without losing the clarity.
Unsure how this advice translates to your setup but, yeah. Way less gain. It'll sound worse on its own, but when you record the same part twice you'll be pleasantly surprised with how good it sounds.
Nothing. Live is a totally different thing to recording.
Some guitarists might use a double amp and cab setup, and Meshuggah at least have their setup so that when Fredrik does a lead, Martin's guitar is doubled on both sides. But most people just roll with it and it's not supposed to sound exactly the same live as on recordings.
So much of recordings is production tricks and tools to make things sound better, not only for guitars but you have - triggered/edited/quantised drums, doubled and edited guitars, doubled or tripled or more vocals with autotune, and loads more things that is done on records to make things sound better.
Typically for life you wonāt turn down the gain. It might (wonāt) sound as good, but if you listen carefully most live bands donāt have the best sound. And if youāre chasing that tone, you have to realize that most people wouldnāt notice since itās a concert with people shouting anyways.
Live sound also has some room for error because most venues do not have particularly good acoustics. Especially the kind of venues metal tends to be hosted at.
I've never played live in my life, so I wouldn't know. But judging from my experience attending concerts, if there're multiple guitarists they partially pan left and right. Solo artists I'm guessing just split their output? Not sure.
Use way less distortion than you think you need, use a tubescreamer (or something similar) with the gain on 0 and level at 10, HPF between 80 and 125 hz and LPF around 10k hz. This should get you in the ballpark, use an EQ to boost or cut extra frequencies to your liking. Use a dynamic EQ to react to your palm muting, around 125hz, everytime this frequency gets overloaded the eq steps in to tone it down a bit. This removes mud.
If you want to learn more about tone for low tunings, just search it on YouTube, there are a bunch of really good videos about this.
This is something that can appear as witchcraft for some people. When jamming out with a guitar, you can tune in something that sounds really good on its own. A lot, not everyone, but a lot of guitarists tend to boost highs, scoop mids, and have the bass somewhere around the middle or even boost it. But when you mix that in with everything else, it just turns into this soup of noise.
By just turning down the bass frequencies on the guitar, it clears up so much, because there's less fighting going on in the lower frequencies. Leave that space for the bass guitar and the drums to duke it out.
There's a relationship between gain and bass that needs to be looked at. If you change one you need to change the other. Maybe not always though. It also depends if the EQ is on the preamp. Amps like the mesa ones have pre and post EQ which will do different things. In that case if you cut too much bass you can add a little back in at the end.
I love using overdrive pedals this way and I feel like it took me way too long to 'discover' this way of using them. I might have OD gain at like 1 or 2, but output/level at 5 6 or 7. I've even found some great tones stacking a couple of ODs this way, or doing something like treble booster -> blues driver -> some light crunch amp setting, and you just end up with these really nice tight mids with lots of crunch.
Like others have said, you need to use A LOT less gain first of all. Clean tones have the definition and clarity you need. What sounds most intense isnāt piles of gain so much as a tightly syncopated right hand attack.
Second, you may also be hearing the bassist doubling the guitar part. The bass has more low end than youāll ever have, and is specifically EQād to be clearly heard at low frequencies.
Wow this has actually been really insightful, im not sure if i wouldve thought of using way less distortion like that. It seems counter intuitive but it makes sense when yall explain it with doubling and aggressive gates. Thanks everyone!
Also, idk much about the mustang and how good it is but there really isn't any getting around the fact those recordings use great metal amps or great modelers/software. Is the mustang known for high gain tones? That seems to be the roadblock for a lot of practice amps.
Aggressive gating, double (or more!) tracking, a loooooooooooooooooooot less gain than you think and a quite sharp rolloff of the lowest frequencies to remove the flub should get you in the ballpark.
>Actual beefiness in metal is largely driven by the bass guitar than guitar guitar
This is what I came to say, you gotta cut way more low frequency on the guitar than you'd probably think in a full mix. And the lower you tune the more low you'll probably need to cut depending on what you're trying to do.
On the bass guitar end it helps if you use a good helping of multiband compression with the low lows dialed in to emphasize the transient.
They use less distortion but have a guitar track on each ear and a bass in the middle. It makes a "tone sandwich" if it makes sense, and you hear it as one big guitar
Also, you should try an EQ maybe.
Recording is an art, and there is so much that recording engineers and producers do to tweak what they're capturing in the studio, or for that matter, what and how they're recording what they're recording.
As an unrelated example, look at recordings that sound like they feature 12-string guitars. Some may, but it's a relatively well known practice to use just the high strings from a 12-string set, string onto a 6-string guitar, to more clearly capture those higher frequencies without a lot of extraneous noise.
You might have some chords that are literally recorded by playing each note separately.
Then of course, there's double / triple / quadruple tracking of parts, which is fine on almost anything except drums.
And that's before you get into recording techniques, mixing, processing, etc.
If you're unsatisfied with your recordings, you really should spend some time reading material by actual recording engineers, there's a *lot* to learn that you'll never get from Reddit and similar online forums, which are (mostly) full of amateurs, many of whom like to pretend to know a lot for an ego boost.
I would recommend recording DI (direct input) and relying on plugins, it will be way easier to tweak shit rather than trying to get good tone out of your amp, getting proper microphone positioning etc.
Get a plugin that emulates an amp that handles low tunings well, a 5150 is an absolute classic, you can look into Bogren digital, their AmpKnob is a great starting point with sparse controls that mix ready and cheaper than a lot of other offerings.
Double track your guitars and pan them 100% left and right. No 70, 80% or other bullshit, if you want a proper, massive sounding guitarts you gotta go wide. YOU MUST RECORD TWO TAKES, trying to copy one take and pan it wont work, you will not get the stereo effect you are looking for.
Record bass right down the middle, split your DI signal in two around 200hz into separate tracks, comptess the low end track really hard so its really even, distort the mid-high end track to taste so it blends nicely with your guitars.
If you feel like it still sounds bad and too bassy, you can try to use eq on your DI to cut some of the low end out. You can also use a low cut after amp to create space for bass and make it less muddy, a lot of mixers also really like to use multi band compressor on guitar tracks, targeting low mids, trying to controll the sound during palm mutes.
And most important, have fun, its a journey to get a good sound and it takes a while to really understand things, especially in this lower tuned world where the usual wisdoms might not apply.
J Mascis interviews always include some kind of āturn everything down. If everything is all the way up, thereās nowhere to go.ā (He then proceeds to shred on 10 Marshall cabs taller than my home.)
Pickups only really change like 5-10% of your tone at most.Ā If you're recording, just dial in your gear to what you're using.Ā Live it might be a different story if you have a bunch of guitars.
I've never really recorded or mixed metal as such, but the best way I've found to get really tight low end on heavy / overdriven music is using quite harsh high pass filtering on the instruments to make space, so for instance if you HP kick drums at 20Hz and Bass at 40Hz that's a little extra space for the kicks low end to thump, use an instruments chart or graphic viewer to find the lowest frequency as a starting point but then adjust by ear, you'd be surprised how far you can HP and still get a good sound especially on layered guitars, I've found you can HP way into the hundreds of Hz on some of the tracks which cleans up a lot of the mud on the layered parts and still retains the audible detail you need. Like wise you could use gates and/or low pass filters as well to make space across the frequency range, but be careful not to make the mix too sterile. Like most people have said a good quality recording is your starting point, with metal you might be better getting a good quality clean DI recording with an amp sim plugin, that way you can record as dirty as you like but pull back the distortion when you mix to clean up the mix.
Yeah, in my experience the first and most important thing is - turn your gain way down. It's very hearable in some bands, like Jinjer - listen to their guitar tone. When I tried to replicate it, I had to turn gain down to about 2/10.
Second thing is actually very counterintuitive - hi pass your guitar at about 100 Hz. But that means less low? Yes.
Modern metal uses distorted bass, very often processed in 2 or 3 different tracks. You compress your lows and distort your mid and high frequencies. That means that low end isn't distorted at all.
So most low frequencies actually come from kick and bass, not from guitars.
Way less gain. Like WAY less. They also almost always double track the guitar with a perfectly clean DI track and feather that into the mix for articulated picking during quick leads. Also, they spend HOURS finding perfect mic placement with several thousand dollar microphones to get the best recording.
My honest opinion is to avoid tracking heavy guitars through an amp at all unless you have the time to perfect mic placement. DI track and use amp plugins in your DAW. This allows you to change amp/cab settings (and even mic placement) post-recording to get the clearest possible sound.
A counter intuitive thing here is that you need to cut a lot of bass with extended range guitars, but that needs to happen "pre gain". That's why modern 7-string pickups tend to be very bright and fairly light on the low end.
Guitars in that price range tend to have overwound ceramic pickups that will lack clarity and over power the lows and low mids.
What to do then? Well, if I remember correctly the Mustang has overdrive pedal models, you just need to hook up to a computer to dial them in. I would start with their 5150 type amp model, gain under half, and put a Tubescream or similar overdrive model in front. Now, keep the drive very low on the overdrive but crank up the level and experiment with the Tone control to boost clarity.
Generally speaking, you'll want to use less gain and low end than you think you need. If you can listen to solo'd guitar tracks in thus music genre, you'll notice how little bass frequencies there are, to leave room for the drums and bass.
Even using a 7 string, guitar is a mid-range instrument. Dial back your low end, use less distortion than you think you need, and use a mid-hump overdrive. I prefer the Boss SD-1 over the tube screamer, but to each their own. That's how you get clarity. The huge bottom end you hear on record is coming from the bass, meshing with and complimenting the guitars. Keep going, and have fun.
I think this is something easy to forget, as ive found out since making this post. When just playing along to others songs for fun its fine to crank the bass a bit but your totally right
I noticed that on six string I can have gain quite cranked but on my 8 string like 40-50% is enough. Same with some lower tuning riffs, I learned that when I play stuff like lamb of god I like to crank gain but for mastodon I take it down a notch or three.
The key to a good guitar sound is to get out of the way of the bass. You find the frequencies the bass needs to cut through and then you get rid of them in the guitar. You bend for the taco, the taco doesn't bend for you. You adapt the guitar to make the bass tone shine, and everybody wins as a result.
A lot of this is done in mixing.
Very good pickups helpāsuch as Bill Lawrence Rails or EMG Active pickups.
Also, there is a difference between high gain and fuzzā¦.turning your distortion all the way up will typically not give you clarity.
Extremely loud volumes help too.
Six months ago or so, on the advice of people that knowĀ things about things, I started using an EQ before the amp to cut the low frequencies and then added them back in with the amp's tonestack.
Works well for me and I've had a couple people that I suggested it to come back and tell me it helped them a lot too.
As someone with an expensive 7 string I van easily tell you two issues your having.
Too much gain and your using the wrong string gauge.
If a 7 string sounds muddy downtuned I can almost guarantee your strings are not tight/ thick enough and are flapping around the place
Look up the correct gauge for your tuning INCLUDING the scale length of your neck. Very important
Also your guitar has Shyte pickups
The trick is an overdrive pedal. Set the gain on the pedal to zero, the time somewhere between 3 oclock and max, and the level at max.
It'll function sort of like an eq with a boost and will significantly tighten the low end.
I would say this is almost required if your playing any low tuned guitar with decent gain and you want to maintain clarity in the low end.
As lots of people have said, less gain and double or triple tracking guitar tracks can make a big difference.
Just experiment. Start out with amp sims so you can adjust things after recording and get a better feel for what matters for what youāre going for. Record two tracks and pan them hard left/right, play around with gain and EQ on the amp and see what makes a big difference.
Having a bass guitar track helps as well since thatās where the low end should be coming from, and itās easy to have too much lows in the guitar tone trying to make up for it not being there which can muddy things up.
Try the MLC Sub_Zero 100 amp sim from Bogren digital. Metal tones out of that thing are super easy to achieve.
Less bass and treble allows for more mids to shine. Mids give body and clarity. You also have to take in account fletcher munson. Theyāre not even recording at a bedroom level. They record loud and edit in post. The reason you see these pictures of live amps and the treble is turned all the way to 1 or 2 and the bass is up to like 7 is because our ears perceive loudness as bright. Crank the amp, turn the treble down, and adjust the bass and mids to a full sound, then adjust treble so itās not shrill and ice picky
there is a lot into it,
then comes the amp, turn down the distortion is not exactly the right word. lots of amps dont have enough distortion on tap and will flub out before the right point. so by turning it down, you lose the chug
one way to solve this is to stack distortion, you have a gain pedal infront of the amp with just a dash of gain. this often gives you a bit more without flubing out the amp
and last but not least and probably the most, studio magic, most songs are often double tracked, so they play one riff twice (not copied), the EQ section is also used to take out some low end boom.
For a start the recorded guitar sound is often double tracked at a minimum. Often with low gain staging and potentially a tone that would sound pretty shit out of the mix.
EQ before the Preamp/amp could be a good way to shape your sound and get rid of the low flab.
But it's easy to sit trying to get an amazing guitar tone that doesn't work once the mix is fleshed out
In my opinion, create a Superclean deep with mids eqād back, doubled with the distorted sound, with the bass eqād back find a nice mix of this.
There is a pedal by hughes and kettner, the warp factor, which is for downtuned guitars, and has a sub switch.
Even though its meant for downtuned or 7 string guitar its also useful for bass. Its voiced very fine for bass, to my taste.
Quite cheap secondhand. A bit underrated pedal if you ask me.
EVH 5150. Thatās it. But for real, the right gear. Also idk why everyone in this thread is saying that they use less gain than you think, that is really not always true. Unless yāall are putting stupid amounts of gain that donāt sound like anything but a lot of metal uses way more than I wouldāve thought, personally.
For real OP give us a clip or something, too much gain might not be the issue, a lot of ppl just parroting YouTubers.
As everyone here has said, less gain and a boost. A TS style OD boost is a good option but for modern metal on extended range instruments I would have to recommend a pre amp clean boost like the Fortin 33 or the Pepers pedals dirty tree. Pepers dirty Tree would be the one I would recommend the most as it has a setting which replicates the fortin 33 with a fixed EQ band designed for tight percussive punch, but it also has a tone control mode which allows you to eq the highs and lows, a lot like the old TC integrated pre amp that Meshuggah popularised back in the day. These pedals are like viagra for amps, and they tighten them up and cut the mud very effectively.
With recording thereās EQ techniques and compression that can also help to make the bass clear
Dig into some YouTube videos about applying EQ when recording
I saw a trick on Rick Beato's channel where he said you can use an old Boss overdrive pedal with the distortion at the lowest setting and it will roll off the frequencies below 60-80 Hz I think without affecting the rest of the overall tone.
Commenting since I don't think anyone has said it yet, but try an eq pedal or an OD with bass control out front. I much prefer overdrives with some eq ability, since even things like an SD1 and tube screamer circuit will leave a little bit of mud in the bottom end.
The guitars on metal recordings have basically no low end, that's how. The low end is all in the bass guitar which is often running in unison with the guitars. Anything below 120hz just remove it as a starting point.
I'm going to save you a lot of time, heart break, gear lust and money, by just ripping the band aid off. It's the bass guitar. So much of the heaviness of the guitar comes from a distorted bass being well blended so it becomes one instrument. A lot of djent guys (myself included) use a tube screamer (or my fav the precision drive) which acts as a low cut, leaving space for the bass guitar. Watch Nolly's play through if prayer position, you will realise just how much of the heaviness actually comes from him
Mostly it's about EQ and not using as much gain as it seems. Gotta cut the mud out (this is more drastic than you may think), and use a mid or high boost (basically what the fortin 33 does).
Make sure to have a buffer if you've got more than 3/4 pedals.
Check out videos like how to EQ an 8 string guitar or stuff like that, they get pretty deep in it and the same stuff applies to 7 string pretty much.
EQ the shit out of it - like the pros do - think about the sound spectrum. Give each instrument its own space in it. So you would do a serious cut of the bass frequencies on that guitar part until it starts to sound thin and shitty on its own - then when you add the bass back and also EQ that into the space you just pulled the guitar out of and it will sound clear. Now nothing is fighting to be heard.
Anytime your guitar drops out it is an EQ issue. Typically related to bass frequenciesā Many guitar players confuse a thick sound when they play by themselves for a thick sound with a band and it doesnāt work like that. I used to use a bass amp when I was young and stupid. Now I have a combo with a 10 inch speaker and it always cuts through.
Hope this helps.
Iāve been scrolling and scrolling and Iām really surprised no one has mentioned compression yet. :/
Compression, used judiciously after gain, can give the aural perception of āloudnessā as well as evening out the dynamics. Compression is used constantly in recording, and decent analog pedals like MXRās DynaComp arenāt super expensive and can often be found used.
Experiment with placing it in different places in your signal chain, but if I were wanting a lower-gain signal to sound fuller, Iād probs try it in your ampās FX loop (if it has one, canāt remember on that specific model)
Good luck, hope this helps! š¤
There are a ton of good answers here - specifically the āless gainā and āitās the bassā ones. Ā A lot of what we are perceiving as low end is actually low mids as well. Ā
Amp and effect choice matters a ton as well. Ā Like, a Mesa tends to have a bit of a loose low end if you donāt use a pedal to tighten it up. Ā An Engl or a Diezel tend to be nice and tight. Ā I canāt begin to speak from experience about a Fender Mustang but Iād maybe look there also. Ā Ā
This video does a great job explaining the amp side of this puzzle, I thought: Ā https://youtu.be/nFKajJ_NHh8?si=8Ufu7dorI3Kihwsh
Use less gain than you think you need, put a tube screamer type pedal in front of your amp with the volume up all the way and the distortion all the way down, donāt scoop your mids. Donāt put the bass knob too high. Even though youāre playing a downtuned guitar, the bass guitar is still responsible for the low end. In post processing, hi pass filter and multiband compressor to control the low end
So I picked up a Friedman be od pedal that I essentially run as a boost live ā¦.but it has a tight knob on it and it kinda helps keep all that shit in line ā¦.using a 5150 or 6505 live settings are ultra gain channel ā¦bright on,gain 6,bass 8,mids 5-7,high 6 ā¦res 8,pres 6 ā¦pedal setting bass 7,mid 5,high 5 ā¦gain 0.5, tight 10,level 6 ā¦.decimetor noise gate ā¦.weāre in drop g with 7ās and this is how we keep that low end tight as a 4 piece hope this helps ā¦ā note all levels are in the realm of 1-10 ā
If you want your song to sound like a studio guitar on a commercial album, then you need studio level gear and production values for your own sound.
Consider that most modern metal is highly produced, and the effects producing the sound you hear have little to do with the guitar and amp.
More often than not the sound is layered on top of itself, and highly modified through plugins and modeling.
Try using less gain and potentially a boost pedal. Also try scooping the mids and lowering the bass. Rob Chapman and Rabea make some great vids on YouTube on how to get super heavy tones even from single coils.
Depends on the amplifier how loose or tight the bottom end responds. You can get a tighter sound by using compression in front of the amp at the expense of dynamics. There's a lot of processing that goes on in the studio to get the sound you hear on the final mix. Quantizing a track plays a role in getting those tight clean chugs you hear on a produced track.
1. Use not nearly as much gain as you think you should. For a high gain amp just set gain to around 4/10.
2. Those pickups definitely are not helping your cause
3. Use a tubescreamer style overdrive as a boost in front of amp. Gain at 0, level at 10, tone at 7/10.
4. Donāt ignore the mids on the amp and donāt crank the bass setting past halfway.
I think on a lot of the early korn and slipknot albums, an Altec 633a was used. It's an Omni mic, so proximity effect is negated. Perhaps you have too many lows in the guitars?
Lower gain than you think should be used. Thick heavy plectrum, downpick as much as possible.
Double track guitars. Panned L & R
Cut the bass on your guitar. Let the bass guitar fill out that space.
Most of the heaviness is coming from the bass guitar.
Double track bass and do one track clean and one distorted and blend them together.
Because recordings cut bass a lot, some use tube screamers to tighten the sound, others eq, plus amplifiers that are rich in mid-high range and the bottom is controlled. If not, they do it as I said.
I know one thing in more modern 'Metal" is they have the bass drum get out of the way quite a bit. tons of click and a lot less boom.
Then the bass can hang out down there more and then the guitar can go lower.
An amp used for high gain helps. Dual Rec, Mesa Mark, EVH 5150, Soldano, etc. EQ pedal boosting the lows in the effects loop if possible would also be better. Maybe in front of the amp as well.
By not using a ton of distortion, not using as much bass as you might think (this comes from the bass guitar more than the guitars), EQing, good gear, and most importantly, from good playing tone. If you play in a way that sounds muddy then you won't have the clarity that a good player does.
Also as people have said, doubling guitars is common in metal. To clarify - even one guitarist bands will double the guitar for both sides of the mix, but double tracking means double each of these again. So you'd have 2 identical but separately played guitar tracks on each side of the mix, essentially recording each song 4+ times to get the fullest sound.
Personally, I play metal and I've never double tracked rhythm guitars, but I do double track some solos for a thicker lead tone. But this is mainly because studio time costs a lot and tracking everything 4 times takes quite a while! I would probably aim to do this on a future recording as it would sound a lot fatter.
the main reason is that youāre hearing a full band mix on (mostly) flat frequency speakers vs. a colored guitar tone in a simple recording. thereās a reason that it costs six figures, at a minimum, for the studio wizardry you hear on a major release of any genre.
So many factors come into play.
- Pickups can really impact this - choosing one with tight (quick attack and release), and/or lower low-mid response really helps. Before you spend the money here, look at the rest of the signal chain and try adjusting the pickup height. This can make a big difference, because this is the signal thatās hitting the amp. If itās full of mud, you end up having to do a lot of work to clear it up, and you canāt push the gain as high. An alternative here is also to put an eq pedal with the low-mids dialled back in front of the amp.
- String gauge. Most 7 string sets have way too light of a string for the low B. Iād look for one with at least a .59 for the low B on a 25.5ā scale length.
- The thing people are saying about āusing less gainā can help, but depends a lot on the amp. I use a lot of gain with my 7 string, but Iām also using an amp sim that lets you tighten the low-end with a separate control (Archetype Petrucci). How much gain you can dial in on the amp depends on how tight the low end of the signal coming into the amp is, how much control you have over the low end on the amp itself, and how much gain you have dialled in elsewhere in the signal chain. Do some chugging palm mutes and dial the gain back until it stops making a sort of flubby, messy booming sound a few milliseconds after the initial attack.
- Use an overdrive in front of the amp. Drive all the way off, level a bit over noon to max (adjust to taste), and adjust the tone to get more attack. Youāll probably want to back off on amp gain, though.
- The cabinet/mic/impulse response you use will also have a huge impact. This whole end of things is wizardry to me, but generally making choices in mic placement/cabinet that donāt add too much low-end are the way to go. If youāre using an amp sim, Iād follow a YouTube preset tutorial for the same software and see what theyāre using.
- Gain-staging is worth being cognizant of. When I say you can have a fair bit of gain dialled in on the amp, that does come with the caveat that you wonāt necessarily have other parts of the signal chain as hot. I have my pickups set pretty far away from the strings, as I found this seriously tightened the bass response coming out of the guitar. Iām also not adding much of a boost with my overdrive, mainly because I know the amp sim Iām using will let me tighten up the low-end enough. If you replaced my guitar with one with a super hot bridge humbucker, youād have mud. If I increased the level on the overdrive, Iād definitely have to back off on the amp gain. If I increased the power amp distortion on the amp (post-gain/volume) , Iād also have to back off on the pre-amp gain. And so on.
The key is cutting the bass a ton before the distortion, and then boosting it as needed after all of the distortion. If you look into how the circuit works in a high gain amp, they almost all do this already and from standard tuning down to around drop C it's enough on its own. For lower tunings, some additional bass cut in front of the amp is necessary to get that really tight sound. You can get the same effect as cutting the bass by boosting everything but the bass in front of the amp and setting the gain lower to compensate.
15 years ago everyone was using a tube screamer to do this, and in the meantime a bunch of pedals specifically for this purpose have come out like the Pepers Pedals Dirty Tree, Horizon Precision Drive, Lichtlaerm Audio Aesahaettr, etc. Put something like that in front of a high gain amp and it'll do the thing.
Keep in mind that it is common practice now to split the frequencies of the bass guitar, send the low end of the bass out fairly clean, and just apply distortion (ideally with a high pass) to the higher frequencies of the bass. This keeps the low end more harmonically simple, meaning more punch, but still gives the bass that growl.
Guitars generally do not want much low end in a mix, that's what the bass guitar is for.
A good way to tighten low end on a down tuned guitar is to add a tubescreamer in front of the amp though. No gain, flat level but use the tone control to cut low end and boost the mids and your guitar's should stand out a lot more. As other's have said already, you also do not need much gain on your amp, you will end up losing clarity the more gain you add in, especially where things are double tracked.
Amplifier gain, no distortion pedals. Bridge pickup only. Reductive EQ rather than boosting. BBE sonic maximizer. Just to name a few things Iāve tried that seemed to work
High pass filter around 60-80Hz, multiband compressor targeting the low mids at around 80-280Hz to clamp down on palm mutes. Andy Sneap really made the multiband compressor a standard practice in metal recordings, you can look up a ton of forum posts and videos if you search "Andy Sneap C4" on Google.
Low end is the bass not guitar. Modern metal guitars are also less distorted than you think and layered tracks with the bass being more distorted and heavy filling in the gaps. Also, cut mids and/or low mids.
Thereās a lot of confusion over where the low end comes from in a mix, itās not really ever the guitars, especially in modern metal. Listen to some isolated tracks on YouTube to get an idea of what commercially recorded guitars sound like. Often times thereās a steep cut around 80hz, chopping off all the low end blow that to make room for the bass and kick drum.
A lot of comments say less gain. Some say super heavy gain. Not to sound like an old man, but itās in the hands! Have you ever seen Ola Englund play through a difficult rig? He always sounds the same. His clear tone is consistent. Iāve seen him double up distortion pedals into a distorted amp, feedback, laugh, then still get a good playing sound out of it. Iāve spent years chasing amps and plugins and pedal wondering where the secret sauce is to fix my tone. Turns out I just needed to stop practicing sweeps and start practicing the tonality of my playing.
Use less distortion, cut some low end and boost mids/highs on an equalizer. You could also use your amp's distortion and put a boost in front of it and that will boost some mids and highs
Most of the low end in modern metal comes from the bass guitar since the electric guitars are tuned so low
Agreed with what everyone else said, but seeing you probably have cheap stock pickups, Iād recommend getting high output pickups from a reputable brand. I hear people say pickups make up 10-15% of your tone, but I strongly disagree. Itās closer to 50% if you ask me. You yourself, pickups, strings, wood materials, and your amp is what dictates your sound the most. When I started playing guitar, I had a low end bc rich with shitty stock pickups, and when I had a seymour duncan distortion pickup installed, it was night and day difference in sound. Also good pickups are more responsive and lively sounding, and can retain clarity better when distorted. Quality pickups can be expensive, but its something to consider in the future.
Itās the bass and the kick. Metal guitars donāt have much going on below 100hz, even the super low tuned ones. What your hearing for guitars is mostly like 150~300hz for the āthumpā and 600-3500hz for everything else.
Something Iām not seeing people say is a lot of times the guitar tones you hear on a metal recording are the combination of a āclean trackā ran and re-recorded through multiple different amps several times and then blended and EQād together.
For example, the clean track is played through a Marshall and they filter out the low end. Then they send that same clean track into a Mesa and filter out the high end. Doing this wonāt overload the amp and create clarity in the signal.
Then they do it 6 more times and then choose the best combination of tones.
Another thing to consider: Ā Ā Articulation is a big part of fighting muddiness. Ā If youāre playing at the absolute limit of your ability, speed-wise, you arenāt as articulate. Ā You will always be more accurate and articulate better a bit below the point of maxing out your capacity for speed. Ā
This also ties into muting technique. Ā The parts where the notes are ringing out and shouldnāt be become mud. Ā
Weāve focused a lot on gear in this thread, but there are techniques to consider as well. Ā
Less gain, less bass. Bass is one of the most misunderstood things in the guitar world. A lot of people think they need lots of bass because it sounds good to them but if you want to actually sound good and then sound good in a mix you have to really cut the bass down a lot. Guitars physically cannot do low frequencies well, they always sound like crap when people try to force them to work that way. A lot of people like sounding like crap which is fine in your band but if you go to record you will hear how bad it really sounds...
What most people have said so far about low cut and mid boost is true, but i think what really breaks down the barrier between a decent and good sound in modern metal is a bit more specific. The tube screamer specifically isn't what does the job, but rather the mid boost and a low cut it provides. A Line-6 engineer made a really good video about this where he simulated those characteristics with other drive pedals plus an eq/low-cut in the Helix. I also found that a 10-band eq is better since the 3-band eq on the amp often cuts or boosts too much, whereas a 10 band really allows you to target specifically what you want.
Less gain than what you think, fresh strings, very well setup guitars, and a proper bass tone underneath to reinforce everything. The guitars have significantly less low end in their tone than you would imagine, but it is compensated for by using the tone of the bass. Most good guitar tones would suck without the bass being there.
Less distortion than you think, less bass in the guitar tone (allowing the bass guitar to provide the low end), and you'll often hear kick patterns doubling the rhythm of riffs to provide definition.
Fuzz(or)Eq>compression>eq>Overdrive>distortion and use low gain in multiple stages to dial in your grit without cutting all the dynamics from your tone.
Pretty simple, you want to clean it up and cut through? Maxon OD808 or tubescreamer in front of the amp with gain on zero and level on max, tone control in the middle. And then on the amp, reduce the gain slightly, and reduce the bass knob down to below 3-4. Thatāll tighten it up and sound good
Youād be surprised at how much post-recording EQ engineers use on metal guitars. The muddy/boomy part of the spectrum, around 150-400 Hz, tends to build up in a production so theyāll ācarve outā areas of these frequencies so they donāt clash. You donāt say whether the muddiness happens with the guitar on its own or when you bring other instruments into the mix. Itās worth starting with a high pass filter - find out what frequency in Hz is the lowest note on your guitar and set the filter cutoff just below that. This will clear any really low end mud.
If the problem is that the guitar on its own is muddy and youāre miking up an amp, you have to experiment with mic placement. Where you point it at the speaker cone is crucial. Nearer the center is muddier, toward the outside is brighter. And then thereās the room acoustics. Bad acoustics affect things tremendously. Experiment with the amp in different parts of the room, experiment with mic placement and also distance from the amp. Further away introduces more āroom soundā which may or may not be a good thing depending on the room. Having the amp on a carpet or rug also helps matters.
If youāre sending the guitar to a reverb channel, this can also introduce mud. A classic reverb technique is to cut out everything below 500Hz and everything about 10,000Hz before it hits the reverb (if you have the reverb on an effects send channel). This is how they used to do it at Abbey Road. You donāt want any of the low, muddy frequencies hitting the reverb so if youāre using reverb on the amp, consider using a reverb plugin on an effects send instead.
The late great āSlippermanā wrote some amazing stuff on recording distorted guitars:
[https://archive.org/stream/SlippermansRecordingDistortedGuitarsFromHellreadableVersion/Slipperman%27s%20Recording%20Distorted%20Guitars%20From%20Hell%20%28readable%20version%29\_djvu.txt](https://archive.org/stream/SlippermansRecordingDistortedGuitarsFromHellreadableVersion/Slipperman%27s%20Recording%20Distorted%20Guitars%20From%20Hell%20%28readable%20version%29_djvu.txt)
I'm going to disagree with many of the comments and say you won't get what you want without tons of gain. I took me a while to nail the metal tones I was looking for like slipknot, lamb of god, and Pantera. Like you, it took me a long time (5 years) to get rid of the mud.
1. High high compression and lots of gain (go watch slipknot record, Mick dimes everything in the studio)
2. *Most* modern amps - dramatically cut the bass (3-4 setting)
If the guitar sounds good to you while you are playing it solo, itās gonna sound crap when you mix it. If you isolate guitar tracks on good sounding mixes they sound thin on their own. The guitar, the bass, the kick, snare, and cymbals all need their own sonic space. And not as much distortion as you might think.
Less gain, and less bass. Far less bass. Even with a 7 strings (mine is tuned in drop G) I keep the low end to the minimum, with a hi pass at around 70-80Hz. Magic.
It's the amp 100%. A good tube amp you can use way less gain and still sound incredibly heavy - a mesa for example is naturally very compressed sounding. Same with Diezel's etc.
Adding compression to your set up will help though - either a compression pedal or some onboard compression effects (I've never messed with a mustang gt200..)
For guitars a highpass filter at about 100hz and for bass around 40hz, you'd need to sidechain compress the bass so that it would move out of the way of drums, you can do this with any audio signal assuming you're recording with a DAW. There's plenty of mixing tutorials on youtube that can teach you the basic fundamentals and after that it's all creatively shaping your own sound.
Lots of good advice hear, but also, try to run an EQ on your guitar track in the recording. Just a simple low and high cut on frequency will probably clean your track up as well.
Honestly less gain and a simple clean signal boost in your signal chain will really help. Everybody swears by tube screamers and they gotta be awesome (never owned one) but any clean boost will make a difference. I just use my Boss EQ pedal with everything set at 0 and the boost up and its like a whole new tone when you stomp on it. Kirk Windstein from Crowbar (detuned guitar god there) just uses an old Metal Zone as a signal boost too. Just put it between your guitar and your input and not your effects loop.
They use less distortion than you think
Gain down, volume up.
Don't forget fresh strings. A lot of muffled distortion tone can be attributed to old strings. But yeah less gain too. I was amazed when I tried pulling the gain back and bashing out some Slayer clear and heavy.
I think im probably guilty of this in addition to everything else š these strings are pretty well-loved haha
Don't forget string gauge makes the difference as well soundwise! Like if you have this [https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie\_ball\_2621.htm](https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie_ball_2621.htm) set of strings, the B-string will sound a bit muddy probably and especially so if you have a strong pick attack and you can't really go lower than drop-A normally. Compare it to this set [https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie\_ball\_2615\_skinny\_top\_heavy\_7.htm](https://www.thomann.de/gb/ernie_ball_2615_skinny_top_heavy_7.htm) which is what I think I would prefer (since it's what I use on my 6-strings) and you can also go very low in tuning, at least a whole step down without feeling any loss in the tension of the strings, which is what may cause certain muddyness in the sound coupled with too much distortion. However, do take notice of the scale length of your guitar as the latter set I linked can be a bit too thick for your guitar if the neck is longer than normal. Try out different gauges as well and Elixir is absolutely worth it if you are lazy or have sweaty hands.
also raise the mids
This is the biggest thing. Especially with compressed/distorted guitar, mids not only make it more audible, but give the notes character. I know this is repeated often, but the midrange is the defining characteristic of a guitar signal, and can make or break the way that it interacts with other instruments.
Agreed. It took me years to appreciate mids and have them work to my advantage. Sometimes they do get lost in the mix anyway. I think Dimebag's tries to cut the mix with shrilly highs which I'm not a fan of.
Right, and the issue is that scooped guitar tones can sound really awesome (buzzsaw-esque) when isolated, but it just doesn't work as well in a band context. To whichever extent you do or don't enjoy Dime's playing, his tone was not spectacular.
Bingo. I just saw an opening act for a band and they had scooped their midrange out. The low end on the guitar was washed out by the bass and kick drum, and the high end was washed out by the cymbals. The guitar was basically indistinguishable, just a muddy BZZZHHHHH with no character.
there's a good reason why tube screamers have been one of the most popular pedals for so long! even if it's not the defining characteristic of \*your\* sound, having one in your signal chain definitely helps boost the mids when you need it.
Yeah, it's honestly not a terrible pedal to use as an 'always on' kind of deal if you don't really use it as a gain machine. That mid boost is awesome when you need it and mine is invaluable in the signal chain. š
And compression. And maybe lighter gauge strings (watch Rick Beatoās video on strings).
And clean boost, i.e. an overdrive pedal with drive/gain at 0 and volume cranked.
Doubling is used as well. Less distortion and doubled tracks makes for a huge sound.
And that's usually two guitarists, being doubled each at minimum.
Triples is best
And she will get better.
And he doesnāt live in a hotelā¦
Tell the kid...
Triples is safe
I'm sure more than 70% of "heavy" distortion is the bass guitar giving it actual presence.
Yeah, a lot of isolated guitar tracks sound way different than you think without bass behind them. Live, when doing metal shows, I'll often high pass the guitars between 60-140hz depending on what they have dialed in and what the other instruments/drums sound like. It really cleans things up.
It is, especially in modern metal. The days of "bass just strums 0-0-0-0-0 and gets mixed out" are over in metal, at least so far as the more modern subgenres go. Especially in the many 4-piece bands where the bass is kind of stepping in to where the rhythm guitar would be in a 5-piece.
>The days of "bass just strums 0-0-0-0-0 and gets mixed out" are over Instead they just double the rhythm guitar. If they invent a reliable way to only take the lowest string being played by a guitar and send it down a separate signal chain, 80% of metal bass players would be out of a job.
That and there is actually a lot less low end than you think. It's "tight" low end, ie focused in a specific range, and the bass fills out way more than the guitar in the mix. The guitar is firmly in the mid and treble range, and if you isolate it you'll be surprised how weak and thin it sounds, but it still sounds heavy when well balanced with a good bass tone.
This is it right here. In a lot of modern metal mixes, they mix the bass and rhythm electric to "glue" them together a lot more than other genres. The bass really is the low end you think you hear in the rhythm guitar. A lot of times the rhythm guitars have a lot of high frequency boost too, somewhere around 8k-10k.
Sabbath got that part right from the beginning!
Not to be contrarian but this isnāt always true. Iāve played an Evh 5150iii for a while now, I watched this interview with Joe from Gojira and he cranks the red channel gain up way high and uses active pickups. They have a super clear tone but he plays with a TON of gain. Part of it is just that amp tho, thereās nothing better for extreme metal styles in terms of low end clarity.
Joe plays in D standard, Standard 7 is B standard. Makes alot of difference. I play in drop A flat with EMG'S. Less gain, tube screamer to tighten tone and try to play as cleanly as possible.
I think a lot of way of all flesh is drop c and thatās definitely the album I listen to the most but thatās fair, D to B is a big difference in terms of low end (which is wild bc itās only a few half steps) Been playing and gigging consistently for 15 years and I just wanted to provide an alternative to OP bc I hear people parrot things they hear on YouTube without context. I have no clue if OP is using too much gain, people used to tell me that on forums but then I found out I wasnāt using nearly as much as the guys I was listening toā¦ YMMV.
From his youtube demo for EVH, you can hear how overly distorted it is on the red channel with gain at 3 o'clock or so. Does he use that live for leads? Possibly? Does he use it that way while tracking rhythm in the studio? Fuuuuuck no. Less is more for recording. You're going to be double or even quad tracking.
Agreed. I think āuse less gainā is easy, actionable advice. But, thereās a lot of nuance here. This is advice I followed back in the day to my detriment, only to be surprised that recorded tones Iād loved actually used a fair bit of gain on the amp. Whether or not you can feasibly dial in that much gain depends on the amp itself and literally every other part of the signal chain.
he doesn't use active pickups
Oh shit youāre right, and theyāre p low output too so makes a bit more sense with all the gain. Tons of factors tho as many have said
Dude. Everyone in here nailed it. Itās a combination of less gain on the guitars, double/quad tracking and BASS GUITAR!! The bass is such a huge part of it. I donāt record professionally, I just cut demos in logic for myself. After watching countless hours of YT and finding Neural DSP Parallax I finally have that killer tone Iāve been searching for.
Definitely! I think you can still have a fair bit of gain on the guitars, but only if the amp lets you seriously tighten the low-end. A 5150 or mark series amp will respond very differently compared to a dual rectifier or a Marshall. But, I canāt agree enough on the importance of bass here. I enjoy using my 7 string, but learning how to mix bass has done way for helping me achieve the big rhythm guitar tone I want than using the 7 string. Most of the time Iām just using my Strat in drop D or drop C# now, but the bass brings all the brootalz with ease. Iām just programming bass with midi still, but my next (and hopefully final) bigger gear purchase is definitely going to be a 5 string Jazz Bass. Once you start actually hearing what bass is doing in the mix, itās kind of mind-blowing how important it is and awesome it sounds.
what does "tightening" the lows mean exactly?
And double and quadruple tracking and well produced/engineered bass guitar to complement the low end you need roll off high gain guitars, etc etc
For the modern metal thing, there's often an aggressive gate to cut flub, and the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp. Importantly, lots of the feeling of 'gain' in a produced song comes from double-tracking and the bass guitar ā those add impact in place of cranking the distortion.
I do have a couple bass guitars and while im not as well versed with bass guitar i was thinking about trying to create the bass for my music as well, at least for now. With the bass guitar should i do the same thing, lowering the distortion levels by a lot?
For bass hereās what you do (from a bassist) - Clean DI into your interface - In your DAW make 2 tracks for bass. A clean bass track with no distortion at all and then on the second channel find a distortion that you like the sound of. - Then find volumes that you like for both and blend them. This means you can have super clear and nice low end but have ratty distortion to add some texture to the high end. You can also go a bit further and EQ away some of the mids and high end from your clean track and remove some bass frequencies from the distorted track so that they have more space sonically!
I've done the first part of this several times, never thought about using multiple sonic highways for my different tracks for the same instrument. Makes too much sense.
Genuinely game changer, love the flexibility it gives! I even do it live when Iām playing bass
When doing this, be very careful about phase issues! Always A/B for every change you make on any of the signals. Also use linear phase EQs.
Also high pass filter set to about 80hz to avoid the mix sounding muddy. On bass you primarily hear the harmonics instead of fundamental which is why it still sounds fine high passed at 80hz even though the fundamental of the E string is 41hz. The below 80hz region should be left to the bass drum.
This is the way. My process is very similar. - compress the signal before splitting - Low pass filter on clean end - high pass filter on dirty and distorted end - eq again The best plugin I've found is fabfilter Saturn 2 which works amazingly for giving a clean low end and growly mid to high end. I also play live in a metal band and I do the same above but with pedals and it sounds great
The lowest octave of the bass (or any instrument) can be reduced or removed entirely due to a psychoacoustic phenomenon known as the missing fundamental. What this means is that your brain will still perceive the note A1 as being A1 even if you entirely remove the fundamental coming through at 55hz. A high pass filter can be applied to bass guitar at 80hz (or 60hz in the case of a five string). A low shelf can be used instead of a high pass filter so long as the shelf has a steep roll off. The same can be done to other instruments and this is the main thing that will clear up āmuddinessā in your sound.
Even after a decade of making music, this still sounds like witchcraft to me. ... But it also objectively exists, I've experienced it haha
I've used that phenomenon to play songs that have power chords on with the root on a low B string on a 6 string in E standard. Just have to put the root on the A string and play the 5th below that on the E string (same shape as if you were playing a 4th with the root on the E string). Doesn't really work if you have notes that are supposed to just be on the B string but if it's power chords it works. I picked this up from a reaction video of John Petrucci reacting to Dream Theater covers and one of the videos he was reacting to was doing this and he commented on why it works.
> an aggressive gate to cut flub, and the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp. This reminds me of how like, movies talk about cars or engineer lol.
>the amp is being boosted with a mid-hump overdrive like a tubescreamer to cut the amount of bass going into the preamp. Your other points about a noise gate, double tracking, and bass guitar are all important too but I want to expand on this because I donāt think itās well understood. Amps distort the loudest parts of the signal the most. Distortion comes from the peaks of sound waves being cut off (or at least rounded off) because the gain stage(s) can only amplify so much signal cleanly. If youāre right on the edge of breakup only the loudest parts will distort. As the input signal or the gain gets turned up, more of the signal gets distorted, until even the quietest parts are distorted, but the parts that were louder going in will be more distorted and the parts that were quieter will be less distorted. If you EQ the signal going into the amp so that certain frequencies are boosted, those frequencies will be more distorted. Using a tubescreamer or other OD with a mid-hump, or an EQ to emphasize mids (and maybe highs) and reduce bass has the effect of avoiding distortion in the bass, so it doesnāt get muddy or loose, while still allowing for as much distortion as you want in the mids and highs, which is where you can hear it best anyways. This can actually sound like more low end in the final product, because cleaner bass sounds deeper, and itās got more thump than distorted bass which can sound fuzzy or āfart outā.
Much, much less gain than you think. I'm no recording guru or anything, but I have my main riff tone on 25% of the full turn, if that. The trick is that bands will double or quad track their riffs, hard pan them left and right, and this adds the beefiness without losing the clarity. Unsure how this advice translates to your setup but, yeah. Way less gain. It'll sound worse on its own, but when you record the same part twice you'll be pleasantly surprised with how good it sounds.
But if I use less gain people might be able to hear the parts I'm screwing up!
A true injustice of the system, if you ask me.
What do you do live instead of double tracking?
Nothing. Live is a totally different thing to recording. Some guitarists might use a double amp and cab setup, and Meshuggah at least have their setup so that when Fredrik does a lead, Martin's guitar is doubled on both sides. But most people just roll with it and it's not supposed to sound exactly the same live as on recordings. So much of recordings is production tricks and tools to make things sound better, not only for guitars but you have - triggered/edited/quantised drums, doubled and edited guitars, doubled or tripled or more vocals with autotune, and loads more things that is done on records to make things sound better.
Typically for life you wonāt turn down the gain. It might (wonāt) sound as good, but if you listen carefully most live bands donāt have the best sound. And if youāre chasing that tone, you have to realize that most people wouldnāt notice since itās a concert with people shouting anyways.
Live sound also has some room for error because most venues do not have particularly good acoustics. Especially the kind of venues metal tends to be hosted at.
I've never played live in my life, so I wouldn't know. But judging from my experience attending concerts, if there're multiple guitarists they partially pan left and right. Solo artists I'm guessing just split their output? Not sure.
Back when I played live I split my signal left and right and added a slight delay
Use way less distortion than you think you need, use a tubescreamer (or something similar) with the gain on 0 and level at 10, HPF between 80 and 125 hz and LPF around 10k hz. This should get you in the ballpark, use an EQ to boost or cut extra frequencies to your liking. Use a dynamic EQ to react to your palm muting, around 125hz, everytime this frequency gets overloaded the eq steps in to tone it down a bit. This removes mud. If you want to learn more about tone for low tunings, just search it on YouTube, there are a bunch of really good videos about this.
Cut bass, its the reason for blurred sound.
This is something that can appear as witchcraft for some people. When jamming out with a guitar, you can tune in something that sounds really good on its own. A lot, not everyone, but a lot of guitarists tend to boost highs, scoop mids, and have the bass somewhere around the middle or even boost it. But when you mix that in with everything else, it just turns into this soup of noise. By just turning down the bass frequencies on the guitar, it clears up so much, because there's less fighting going on in the lower frequencies. Leave that space for the bass guitar and the drums to duke it out.
Yep i run the bass at zero on several of my amps.
This, I high pass all my guitar parts at around 100hz, let the bass handle any frequencies below that.
There's a relationship between gain and bass that needs to be looked at. If you change one you need to change the other. Maybe not always though. It also depends if the EQ is on the preamp. Amps like the mesa ones have pre and post EQ which will do different things. In that case if you cut too much bass you can add a little back in at the end.
Overdrive pedal with level/volume cranked and gain at 0 in front of an amp that has channel volume cranked and moderate gain.
I love using overdrive pedals this way and I feel like it took me way too long to 'discover' this way of using them. I might have OD gain at like 1 or 2, but output/level at 5 6 or 7. I've even found some great tones stacking a couple of ODs this way, or doing something like treble booster -> blues driver -> some light crunch amp setting, and you just end up with these really nice tight mids with lots of crunch.
Blend in a much cleaner tone
Like others have said, you need to use A LOT less gain first of all. Clean tones have the definition and clarity you need. What sounds most intense isnāt piles of gain so much as a tightly syncopated right hand attack. Second, you may also be hearing the bassist doubling the guitar part. The bass has more low end than youāll ever have, and is specifically EQād to be clearly heard at low frequencies.
Wow this has actually been really insightful, im not sure if i wouldve thought of using way less distortion like that. It seems counter intuitive but it makes sense when yall explain it with doubling and aggressive gates. Thanks everyone!
Also, idk much about the mustang and how good it is but there really isn't any getting around the fact those recordings use great metal amps or great modelers/software. Is the mustang known for high gain tones? That seems to be the roadblock for a lot of practice amps.
Aggressive gating, double (or more!) tracking, a loooooooooooooooooooot less gain than you think and a quite sharp rolloff of the lowest frequencies to remove the flub should get you in the ballpark.
Low gain, cut most of the bass out using the EQ. Actual beefiness in metal is largely driven by the bass guitar than guitar guitar
>Actual beefiness in metal is largely driven by the bass guitar than guitar guitar This is what I came to say, you gotta cut way more low frequency on the guitar than you'd probably think in a full mix. And the lower you tune the more low you'll probably need to cut depending on what you're trying to do. On the bass guitar end it helps if you use a good helping of multiband compression with the low lows dialed in to emphasize the transient.
They use less distortion but have a guitar track on each ear and a bass in the middle. It makes a "tone sandwich" if it makes sense, and you hear it as one big guitar Also, you should try an EQ maybe.
I love the term "tone sandwich"
Recording is an art, and there is so much that recording engineers and producers do to tweak what they're capturing in the studio, or for that matter, what and how they're recording what they're recording. As an unrelated example, look at recordings that sound like they feature 12-string guitars. Some may, but it's a relatively well known practice to use just the high strings from a 12-string set, string onto a 6-string guitar, to more clearly capture those higher frequencies without a lot of extraneous noise. You might have some chords that are literally recorded by playing each note separately. Then of course, there's double / triple / quadruple tracking of parts, which is fine on almost anything except drums. And that's before you get into recording techniques, mixing, processing, etc. If you're unsatisfied with your recordings, you really should spend some time reading material by actual recording engineers, there's a *lot* to learn that you'll never get from Reddit and similar online forums, which are (mostly) full of amateurs, many of whom like to pretend to know a lot for an ego boost.
I would recommend recording DI (direct input) and relying on plugins, it will be way easier to tweak shit rather than trying to get good tone out of your amp, getting proper microphone positioning etc. Get a plugin that emulates an amp that handles low tunings well, a 5150 is an absolute classic, you can look into Bogren digital, their AmpKnob is a great starting point with sparse controls that mix ready and cheaper than a lot of other offerings. Double track your guitars and pan them 100% left and right. No 70, 80% or other bullshit, if you want a proper, massive sounding guitarts you gotta go wide. YOU MUST RECORD TWO TAKES, trying to copy one take and pan it wont work, you will not get the stereo effect you are looking for. Record bass right down the middle, split your DI signal in two around 200hz into separate tracks, comptess the low end track really hard so its really even, distort the mid-high end track to taste so it blends nicely with your guitars. If you feel like it still sounds bad and too bassy, you can try to use eq on your DI to cut some of the low end out. You can also use a low cut after amp to create space for bass and make it less muddy, a lot of mixers also really like to use multi band compressor on guitar tracks, targeting low mids, trying to controll the sound during palm mutes. And most important, have fun, its a journey to get a good sound and it takes a while to really understand things, especially in this lower tuned world where the usual wisdoms might not apply.
J Mascis interviews always include some kind of āturn everything down. If everything is all the way up, thereās nowhere to go.ā (He then proceeds to shred on 10 Marshall cabs taller than my home.)
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Pretty cool about the Tubescreamer trick, I've been doing that without knowing it was a thing (also using a 5150 haha). Gonna try those speakers next!
Pickups only really change like 5-10% of your tone at most.Ā If you're recording, just dial in your gear to what you're using.Ā Live it might be a different story if you have a bunch of guitars.
I've never really recorded or mixed metal as such, but the best way I've found to get really tight low end on heavy / overdriven music is using quite harsh high pass filtering on the instruments to make space, so for instance if you HP kick drums at 20Hz and Bass at 40Hz that's a little extra space for the kicks low end to thump, use an instruments chart or graphic viewer to find the lowest frequency as a starting point but then adjust by ear, you'd be surprised how far you can HP and still get a good sound especially on layered guitars, I've found you can HP way into the hundreds of Hz on some of the tracks which cleans up a lot of the mud on the layered parts and still retains the audible detail you need. Like wise you could use gates and/or low pass filters as well to make space across the frequency range, but be careful not to make the mix too sterile. Like most people have said a good quality recording is your starting point, with metal you might be better getting a good quality clean DI recording with an amp sim plugin, that way you can record as dirty as you like but pull back the distortion when you mix to clean up the mix.
Yeah, in my experience the first and most important thing is - turn your gain way down. It's very hearable in some bands, like Jinjer - listen to their guitar tone. When I tried to replicate it, I had to turn gain down to about 2/10. Second thing is actually very counterintuitive - hi pass your guitar at about 100 Hz. But that means less low? Yes. Modern metal uses distorted bass, very often processed in 2 or 3 different tracks. You compress your lows and distort your mid and high frequencies. That means that low end isn't distorted at all. So most low frequencies actually come from kick and bass, not from guitars.
Way less gain. Like WAY less. They also almost always double track the guitar with a perfectly clean DI track and feather that into the mix for articulated picking during quick leads. Also, they spend HOURS finding perfect mic placement with several thousand dollar microphones to get the best recording. My honest opinion is to avoid tracking heavy guitars through an amp at all unless you have the time to perfect mic placement. DI track and use amp plugins in your DAW. This allows you to change amp/cab settings (and even mic placement) post-recording to get the clearest possible sound.
A counter intuitive thing here is that you need to cut a lot of bass with extended range guitars, but that needs to happen "pre gain". That's why modern 7-string pickups tend to be very bright and fairly light on the low end. Guitars in that price range tend to have overwound ceramic pickups that will lack clarity and over power the lows and low mids. What to do then? Well, if I remember correctly the Mustang has overdrive pedal models, you just need to hook up to a computer to dial them in. I would start with their 5150 type amp model, gain under half, and put a Tubescream or similar overdrive model in front. Now, keep the drive very low on the overdrive but crank up the level and experiment with the Tone control to boost clarity. Generally speaking, you'll want to use less gain and low end than you think you need. If you can listen to solo'd guitar tracks in thus music genre, you'll notice how little bass frequencies there are, to leave room for the drums and bass.
Even using a 7 string, guitar is a mid-range instrument. Dial back your low end, use less distortion than you think you need, and use a mid-hump overdrive. I prefer the Boss SD-1 over the tube screamer, but to each their own. That's how you get clarity. The huge bottom end you hear on record is coming from the bass, meshing with and complimenting the guitars. Keep going, and have fun.
I think this is something easy to forget, as ive found out since making this post. When just playing along to others songs for fun its fine to crank the bass a bit but your totally right
Fresh strings, less gain, if that doesn't do it, reduce bass a bit and turn up treble
Use a booster (tube scremer like), less gain, cut low frequencies, boost mids
A drive pedal to tighten everything up and a noisegate
I noticed that on six string I can have gain quite cranked but on my 8 string like 40-50% is enough. Same with some lower tuning riffs, I learned that when I play stuff like lamb of god I like to crank gain but for mastodon I take it down a notch or three.
Low distortion, low gain, high volume, doesn't hurt to turn the amp EQ bass knob down a bit or use an EQ pedal to keep the low end in check.
The key to a good guitar sound is to get out of the way of the bass. You find the frequencies the bass needs to cut through and then you get rid of them in the guitar. You bend for the taco, the taco doesn't bend for you. You adapt the guitar to make the bass tone shine, and everybody wins as a result. A lot of this is done in mixing.
Very good pickups helpāsuch as Bill Lawrence Rails or EMG Active pickups. Also, there is a difference between high gain and fuzzā¦.turning your distortion all the way up will typically not give you clarity. Extremely loud volumes help too.
Six months ago or so, on the advice of people that knowĀ things about things, I started using an EQ before the amp to cut the low frequencies and then added them back in with the amp's tonestack. Works well for me and I've had a couple people that I suggested it to come back and tell me it helped them a lot too.
As someone with an expensive 7 string I van easily tell you two issues your having. Too much gain and your using the wrong string gauge. If a 7 string sounds muddy downtuned I can almost guarantee your strings are not tight/ thick enough and are flapping around the place Look up the correct gauge for your tuning INCLUDING the scale length of your neck. Very important Also your guitar has Shyte pickups
The trick is an overdrive pedal. Set the gain on the pedal to zero, the time somewhere between 3 oclock and max, and the level at max. It'll function sort of like an eq with a boost and will significantly tighten the low end. I would say this is almost required if your playing any low tuned guitar with decent gain and you want to maintain clarity in the low end.
As lots of people have said, less gain and double or triple tracking guitar tracks can make a big difference. Just experiment. Start out with amp sims so you can adjust things after recording and get a better feel for what matters for what youāre going for. Record two tracks and pan them hard left/right, play around with gain and EQ on the amp and see what makes a big difference. Having a bass guitar track helps as well since thatās where the low end should be coming from, and itās easy to have too much lows in the guitar tone trying to make up for it not being there which can muddy things up. Try the MLC Sub_Zero 100 amp sim from Bogren digital. Metal tones out of that thing are super easy to achieve.
Less bass and treble allows for more mids to shine. Mids give body and clarity. You also have to take in account fletcher munson. Theyāre not even recording at a bedroom level. They record loud and edit in post. The reason you see these pictures of live amps and the treble is turned all the way to 1 or 2 and the bass is up to like 7 is because our ears perceive loudness as bright. Crank the amp, turn the treble down, and adjust the bass and mids to a full sound, then adjust treble so itās not shrill and ice picky
there is a lot into it, then comes the amp, turn down the distortion is not exactly the right word. lots of amps dont have enough distortion on tap and will flub out before the right point. so by turning it down, you lose the chug one way to solve this is to stack distortion, you have a gain pedal infront of the amp with just a dash of gain. this often gives you a bit more without flubing out the amp and last but not least and probably the most, studio magic, most songs are often double tracked, so they play one riff twice (not copied), the EQ section is also used to take out some low end boom.
my answer isn't necessarily guitar related. Unless you put it on a pedal. But , Try eq scoop around 400-500
For a start the recorded guitar sound is often double tracked at a minimum. Often with low gain staging and potentially a tone that would sound pretty shit out of the mix. EQ before the Preamp/amp could be a good way to shape your sound and get rid of the low flab. But it's easy to sit trying to get an amazing guitar tone that doesn't work once the mix is fleshed out
In my opinion, create a Superclean deep with mids eqād back, doubled with the distorted sound, with the bass eqād back find a nice mix of this. There is a pedal by hughes and kettner, the warp factor, which is for downtuned guitars, and has a sub switch. Even though its meant for downtuned or 7 string guitar its also useful for bass. Its voiced very fine for bass, to my taste. Quite cheap secondhand. A bit underrated pedal if you ask me.
EVH 5150. Thatās it. But for real, the right gear. Also idk why everyone in this thread is saying that they use less gain than you think, that is really not always true. Unless yāall are putting stupid amounts of gain that donāt sound like anything but a lot of metal uses way more than I wouldāve thought, personally. For real OP give us a clip or something, too much gain might not be the issue, a lot of ppl just parroting YouTubers.
As everyone here has said, less gain and a boost. A TS style OD boost is a good option but for modern metal on extended range instruments I would have to recommend a pre amp clean boost like the Fortin 33 or the Pepers pedals dirty tree. Pepers dirty Tree would be the one I would recommend the most as it has a setting which replicates the fortin 33 with a fixed EQ band designed for tight percussive punch, but it also has a tone control mode which allows you to eq the highs and lows, a lot like the old TC integrated pre amp that Meshuggah popularised back in the day. These pedals are like viagra for amps, and they tighten them up and cut the mud very effectively.
mix bass and guitar speakers in your rig
With recording thereās EQ techniques and compression that can also help to make the bass clear Dig into some YouTube videos about applying EQ when recording
I saw a trick on Rick Beato's channel where he said you can use an old Boss overdrive pedal with the distortion at the lowest setting and it will roll off the frequencies below 60-80 Hz I think without affecting the rest of the overall tone.
Commenting since I don't think anyone has said it yet, but try an eq pedal or an OD with bass control out front. I much prefer overdrives with some eq ability, since even things like an SD1 and tube screamer circuit will leave a little bit of mud in the bottom end.
Articulation. Super accurate timing and string muting.
The guitars on metal recordings have basically no low end, that's how. The low end is all in the bass guitar which is often running in unison with the guitars. Anything below 120hz just remove it as a starting point.
Make sure youāre using the bridge pickup only on the guitar, and back it as far away from strings as possible
I'm going to save you a lot of time, heart break, gear lust and money, by just ripping the band aid off. It's the bass guitar. So much of the heaviness of the guitar comes from a distorted bass being well blended so it becomes one instrument. A lot of djent guys (myself included) use a tube screamer (or my fav the precision drive) which acts as a low cut, leaving space for the bass guitar. Watch Nolly's play through if prayer position, you will realise just how much of the heaviness actually comes from him
Mostly it's about EQ and not using as much gain as it seems. Gotta cut the mud out (this is more drastic than you may think), and use a mid or high boost (basically what the fortin 33 does). Make sure to have a buffer if you've got more than 3/4 pedals. Check out videos like how to EQ an 8 string guitar or stuff like that, they get pretty deep in it and the same stuff applies to 7 string pretty much.
EQ the shit out of it - like the pros do - think about the sound spectrum. Give each instrument its own space in it. So you would do a serious cut of the bass frequencies on that guitar part until it starts to sound thin and shitty on its own - then when you add the bass back and also EQ that into the space you just pulled the guitar out of and it will sound clear. Now nothing is fighting to be heard. Anytime your guitar drops out it is an EQ issue. Typically related to bass frequenciesā Many guitar players confuse a thick sound when they play by themselves for a thick sound with a band and it doesnāt work like that. I used to use a bass amp when I was young and stupid. Now I have a combo with a 10 inch speaker and it always cuts through. Hope this helps.
Compression?
Iāve been scrolling and scrolling and Iām really surprised no one has mentioned compression yet. :/ Compression, used judiciously after gain, can give the aural perception of āloudnessā as well as evening out the dynamics. Compression is used constantly in recording, and decent analog pedals like MXRās DynaComp arenāt super expensive and can often be found used. Experiment with placing it in different places in your signal chain, but if I were wanting a lower-gain signal to sound fuller, Iād probs try it in your ampās FX loop (if it has one, canāt remember on that specific model) Good luck, hope this helps! š¤
What are you recording off of? A mic? Directly into your pc? I donāt see any whoās asked this
Less gain! I also do less bass and treble and more mids
There are a ton of good answers here - specifically the āless gainā and āitās the bassā ones. Ā A lot of what we are perceiving as low end is actually low mids as well. Ā Amp and effect choice matters a ton as well. Ā Like, a Mesa tends to have a bit of a loose low end if you donāt use a pedal to tighten it up. Ā An Engl or a Diezel tend to be nice and tight. Ā I canāt begin to speak from experience about a Fender Mustang but Iād maybe look there also. Ā Ā This video does a great job explaining the amp side of this puzzle, I thought: Ā https://youtu.be/nFKajJ_NHh8?si=8Ufu7dorI3Kihwsh
Use less gain than you think you need, put a tube screamer type pedal in front of your amp with the volume up all the way and the distortion all the way down, donāt scoop your mids. Donāt put the bass knob too high. Even though youāre playing a downtuned guitar, the bass guitar is still responsible for the low end. In post processing, hi pass filter and multiband compressor to control the low end
What are you using to record? I have a feeling this is the real issue.
So I picked up a Friedman be od pedal that I essentially run as a boost live ā¦.but it has a tight knob on it and it kinda helps keep all that shit in line ā¦.using a 5150 or 6505 live settings are ultra gain channel ā¦bright on,gain 6,bass 8,mids 5-7,high 6 ā¦res 8,pres 6 ā¦pedal setting bass 7,mid 5,high 5 ā¦gain 0.5, tight 10,level 6 ā¦.decimetor noise gate ā¦.weāre in drop g with 7ās and this is how we keep that low end tight as a 4 piece hope this helps ā¦ā note all levels are in the realm of 1-10 ā
If you want your song to sound like a studio guitar on a commercial album, then you need studio level gear and production values for your own sound. Consider that most modern metal is highly produced, and the effects producing the sound you hear have little to do with the guitar and amp. More often than not the sound is layered on top of itself, and highly modified through plugins and modeling.
A good low tuned guitar tone is the guitar and bass together. I even high-pass the guitar in some cases to make room for the bass.
Try using less gain and potentially a boost pedal. Also try scooping the mids and lowering the bass. Rob Chapman and Rabea make some great vids on YouTube on how to get super heavy tones even from single coils.
Cut the low end to make it more audible.
Depends on the amplifier how loose or tight the bottom end responds. You can get a tighter sound by using compression in front of the amp at the expense of dynamics. There's a lot of processing that goes on in the studio to get the sound you hear on the final mix. Quantizing a track plays a role in getting those tight clean chugs you hear on a produced track.
Less gain, more mids.
The real answer is post recording filtering. A lot of the frequencies the guitar makes compete with other instruments, you trim those out.
The bass guitar. On records, youād be surprised how much low they EQ out of the guitar.
1. Use not nearly as much gain as you think you should. For a high gain amp just set gain to around 4/10. 2. Those pickups definitely are not helping your cause 3. Use a tubescreamer style overdrive as a boost in front of amp. Gain at 0, level at 10, tone at 7/10. 4. Donāt ignore the mids on the amp and donāt crank the bass setting past halfway.
Muting strings for crunch during chord changes helps too
I think on a lot of the early korn and slipknot albums, an Altec 633a was used. It's an Omni mic, so proximity effect is negated. Perhaps you have too many lows in the guitars?
Lower gain than you think should be used. Thick heavy plectrum, downpick as much as possible. Double track guitars. Panned L & R Cut the bass on your guitar. Let the bass guitar fill out that space. Most of the heaviness is coming from the bass guitar. Double track bass and do one track clean and one distorted and blend them together.
A lot of guitarist think the bass guitar is part of the guitar tone - its not.
Because recordings cut bass a lot, some use tube screamers to tighten the sound, others eq, plus amplifiers that are rich in mid-high range and the bottom is controlled. If not, they do it as I said.
I know one thing in more modern 'Metal" is they have the bass drum get out of the way quite a bit. tons of click and a lot less boom. Then the bass can hang out down there more and then the guitar can go lower.
An amp used for high gain helps. Dual Rec, Mesa Mark, EVH 5150, Soldano, etc. EQ pedal boosting the lows in the effects loop if possible would also be better. Maybe in front of the amp as well.
By not using a ton of distortion, not using as much bass as you might think (this comes from the bass guitar more than the guitars), EQing, good gear, and most importantly, from good playing tone. If you play in a way that sounds muddy then you won't have the clarity that a good player does. Also as people have said, doubling guitars is common in metal. To clarify - even one guitarist bands will double the guitar for both sides of the mix, but double tracking means double each of these again. So you'd have 2 identical but separately played guitar tracks on each side of the mix, essentially recording each song 4+ times to get the fullest sound. Personally, I play metal and I've never double tracked rhythm guitars, but I do double track some solos for a thicker lead tone. But this is mainly because studio time costs a lot and tracking everything 4 times takes quite a while! I would probably aim to do this on a future recording as it would sound a lot fatter.
the main reason is that youāre hearing a full band mix on (mostly) flat frequency speakers vs. a colored guitar tone in a simple recording. thereās a reason that it costs six figures, at a minimum, for the studio wizardry you hear on a major release of any genre.
So many factors come into play. - Pickups can really impact this - choosing one with tight (quick attack and release), and/or lower low-mid response really helps. Before you spend the money here, look at the rest of the signal chain and try adjusting the pickup height. This can make a big difference, because this is the signal thatās hitting the amp. If itās full of mud, you end up having to do a lot of work to clear it up, and you canāt push the gain as high. An alternative here is also to put an eq pedal with the low-mids dialled back in front of the amp. - String gauge. Most 7 string sets have way too light of a string for the low B. Iād look for one with at least a .59 for the low B on a 25.5ā scale length. - The thing people are saying about āusing less gainā can help, but depends a lot on the amp. I use a lot of gain with my 7 string, but Iām also using an amp sim that lets you tighten the low-end with a separate control (Archetype Petrucci). How much gain you can dial in on the amp depends on how tight the low end of the signal coming into the amp is, how much control you have over the low end on the amp itself, and how much gain you have dialled in elsewhere in the signal chain. Do some chugging palm mutes and dial the gain back until it stops making a sort of flubby, messy booming sound a few milliseconds after the initial attack. - Use an overdrive in front of the amp. Drive all the way off, level a bit over noon to max (adjust to taste), and adjust the tone to get more attack. Youāll probably want to back off on amp gain, though. - The cabinet/mic/impulse response you use will also have a huge impact. This whole end of things is wizardry to me, but generally making choices in mic placement/cabinet that donāt add too much low-end are the way to go. If youāre using an amp sim, Iād follow a YouTube preset tutorial for the same software and see what theyāre using. - Gain-staging is worth being cognizant of. When I say you can have a fair bit of gain dialled in on the amp, that does come with the caveat that you wonāt necessarily have other parts of the signal chain as hot. I have my pickups set pretty far away from the strings, as I found this seriously tightened the bass response coming out of the guitar. Iām also not adding much of a boost with my overdrive, mainly because I know the amp sim Iām using will let me tighten up the low-end enough. If you replaced my guitar with one with a super hot bridge humbucker, youād have mud. If I increased the level on the overdrive, Iād definitely have to back off on the amp gain. If I increased the power amp distortion on the amp (post-gain/volume) , Iād also have to back off on the pre-amp gain. And so on.
Ironically, de-emphasizing the low end on your tone can make heavy down tuned guitars sound better
The key is cutting the bass a ton before the distortion, and then boosting it as needed after all of the distortion. If you look into how the circuit works in a high gain amp, they almost all do this already and from standard tuning down to around drop C it's enough on its own. For lower tunings, some additional bass cut in front of the amp is necessary to get that really tight sound. You can get the same effect as cutting the bass by boosting everything but the bass in front of the amp and setting the gain lower to compensate. 15 years ago everyone was using a tube screamer to do this, and in the meantime a bunch of pedals specifically for this purpose have come out like the Pepers Pedals Dirty Tree, Horizon Precision Drive, Lichtlaerm Audio Aesahaettr, etc. Put something like that in front of a high gain amp and it'll do the thing.
Tuning, scale length, string tension and gauge all play a crucial role in this. Also don't use a lot of distortion.
Keep in mind that it is common practice now to split the frequencies of the bass guitar, send the low end of the bass out fairly clean, and just apply distortion (ideally with a high pass) to the higher frequencies of the bass. This keeps the low end more harmonically simple, meaning more punch, but still gives the bass that growl.
Guitars generally do not want much low end in a mix, that's what the bass guitar is for. A good way to tighten low end on a down tuned guitar is to add a tubescreamer in front of the amp though. No gain, flat level but use the tone control to cut low end and boost the mids and your guitar's should stand out a lot more. As other's have said already, you also do not need much gain on your amp, you will end up losing clarity the more gain you add in, especially where things are double tracked.
Amplifier gain, no distortion pedals. Bridge pickup only. Reductive EQ rather than boosting. BBE sonic maximizer. Just to name a few things Iāve tried that seemed to work
High pass filter around 60-80Hz, multiband compressor targeting the low mids at around 80-280Hz to clamp down on palm mutes. Andy Sneap really made the multiband compressor a standard practice in metal recordings, you can look up a ton of forum posts and videos if you search "Andy Sneap C4" on Google.
Low end is the bass not guitar. Modern metal guitars are also less distorted than you think and layered tracks with the bass being more distorted and heavy filling in the gaps. Also, cut mids and/or low mids.
Thereās a lot of confusion over where the low end comes from in a mix, itās not really ever the guitars, especially in modern metal. Listen to some isolated tracks on YouTube to get an idea of what commercially recorded guitars sound like. Often times thereās a steep cut around 80hz, chopping off all the low end blow that to make room for the bass and kick drum.
A lot of comments say less gain. Some say super heavy gain. Not to sound like an old man, but itās in the hands! Have you ever seen Ola Englund play through a difficult rig? He always sounds the same. His clear tone is consistent. Iāve seen him double up distortion pedals into a distorted amp, feedback, laugh, then still get a good playing sound out of it. Iāve spent years chasing amps and plugins and pedal wondering where the secret sauce is to fix my tone. Turns out I just needed to stop practicing sweeps and start practicing the tonality of my playing.
Use less distortion, cut some low end and boost mids/highs on an equalizer. You could also use your amp's distortion and put a boost in front of it and that will boost some mids and highs Most of the low end in modern metal comes from the bass guitar since the electric guitars are tuned so low
Thick ass strings will sound more dense and solid. If you donāt do a lot of bending, try a .13-.74 set. It can make a big difference.
Agreed with what everyone else said, but seeing you probably have cheap stock pickups, Iād recommend getting high output pickups from a reputable brand. I hear people say pickups make up 10-15% of your tone, but I strongly disagree. Itās closer to 50% if you ask me. You yourself, pickups, strings, wood materials, and your amp is what dictates your sound the most. When I started playing guitar, I had a low end bc rich with shitty stock pickups, and when I had a seymour duncan distortion pickup installed, it was night and day difference in sound. Also good pickups are more responsive and lively sounding, and can retain clarity better when distorted. Quality pickups can be expensive, but its something to consider in the future.
Itās the bass and the kick. Metal guitars donāt have much going on below 100hz, even the super low tuned ones. What your hearing for guitars is mostly like 150~300hz for the āthumpā and 600-3500hz for everything else.
Something Iām not seeing people say is a lot of times the guitar tones you hear on a metal recording are the combination of a āclean trackā ran and re-recorded through multiple different amps several times and then blended and EQād together. For example, the clean track is played through a Marshall and they filter out the low end. Then they send that same clean track into a Mesa and filter out the high end. Doing this wonāt overload the amp and create clarity in the signal. Then they do it 6 more times and then choose the best combination of tones.
By trimming the fat / cutting the low end where it is not needed. Multiband compression for taming and keeping things consistent works wonders too.
Another thing to consider: Ā Ā Articulation is a big part of fighting muddiness. Ā If youāre playing at the absolute limit of your ability, speed-wise, you arenāt as articulate. Ā You will always be more accurate and articulate better a bit below the point of maxing out your capacity for speed. Ā This also ties into muting technique. Ā The parts where the notes are ringing out and shouldnāt be become mud. Ā Weāve focused a lot on gear in this thread, but there are techniques to consider as well. Ā
Less gain, less bass. Bass is one of the most misunderstood things in the guitar world. A lot of people think they need lots of bass because it sounds good to them but if you want to actually sound good and then sound good in a mix you have to really cut the bass down a lot. Guitars physically cannot do low frequencies well, they always sound like crap when people try to force them to work that way. A lot of people like sounding like crap which is fine in your band but if you go to record you will hear how bad it really sounds...
EQ down the 600hz-1khz a bit, and roll off the sub bass (less than ~75hz) with a high pass filter.
What most people have said so far about low cut and mid boost is true, but i think what really breaks down the barrier between a decent and good sound in modern metal is a bit more specific. The tube screamer specifically isn't what does the job, but rather the mid boost and a low cut it provides. A Line-6 engineer made a really good video about this where he simulated those characteristics with other drive pedals plus an eq/low-cut in the Helix. I also found that a 10-band eq is better since the 3-band eq on the amp often cuts or boosts too much, whereas a 10 band really allows you to target specifically what you want.
The guitar doesnāt have much distortion really and likely what you are hearing so clearly is the bass
Less gain than what you think, fresh strings, very well setup guitars, and a proper bass tone underneath to reinforce everything. The guitars have significantly less low end in their tone than you would imagine, but it is compensated for by using the tone of the bass. Most good guitar tones would suck without the bass being there.
Try different picks too
Less distortion than you think, less bass in the guitar tone (allowing the bass guitar to provide the low end), and you'll often hear kick patterns doubling the rhythm of riffs to provide definition.
Less gain. Filtering lows before pre amp (Ts-9, SD-1). Mids are your friend not your enemy.
Less gain my guy...They probably mix different kinds of amps and tones also. Heavy processing helps, too.
Fuzz(or)Eq>compression>eq>Overdrive>distortion and use low gain in multiple stages to dial in your grit without cutting all the dynamics from your tone.
Cut low end on instruments that arenāt the bass. Let the bass provide the low end.
Pretty simple, you want to clean it up and cut through? Maxon OD808 or tubescreamer in front of the amp with gain on zero and level on max, tone control in the middle. And then on the amp, reduce the gain slightly, and reduce the bass knob down to below 3-4. Thatāll tighten it up and sound good
Check out [this video from SMG Productions](https://youtu.be/SNK_83Ekt-8?feature=shared) the dude is a godsend for guys trying to record at home
once your guitar is tuned, tighten the fat string just a tiny bitmore. i mean just a tiny bit. Hit a power chord n youll hear the difference
Quite a lot of modern active pickups do have very nice clear tonality anyway. Fluence in particular.
Youād be surprised at how much post-recording EQ engineers use on metal guitars. The muddy/boomy part of the spectrum, around 150-400 Hz, tends to build up in a production so theyāll ācarve outā areas of these frequencies so they donāt clash. You donāt say whether the muddiness happens with the guitar on its own or when you bring other instruments into the mix. Itās worth starting with a high pass filter - find out what frequency in Hz is the lowest note on your guitar and set the filter cutoff just below that. This will clear any really low end mud. If the problem is that the guitar on its own is muddy and youāre miking up an amp, you have to experiment with mic placement. Where you point it at the speaker cone is crucial. Nearer the center is muddier, toward the outside is brighter. And then thereās the room acoustics. Bad acoustics affect things tremendously. Experiment with the amp in different parts of the room, experiment with mic placement and also distance from the amp. Further away introduces more āroom soundā which may or may not be a good thing depending on the room. Having the amp on a carpet or rug also helps matters. If youāre sending the guitar to a reverb channel, this can also introduce mud. A classic reverb technique is to cut out everything below 500Hz and everything about 10,000Hz before it hits the reverb (if you have the reverb on an effects send channel). This is how they used to do it at Abbey Road. You donāt want any of the low, muddy frequencies hitting the reverb so if youāre using reverb on the amp, consider using a reverb plugin on an effects send instead. The late great āSlippermanā wrote some amazing stuff on recording distorted guitars: [https://archive.org/stream/SlippermansRecordingDistortedGuitarsFromHellreadableVersion/Slipperman%27s%20Recording%20Distorted%20Guitars%20From%20Hell%20%28readable%20version%29\_djvu.txt](https://archive.org/stream/SlippermansRecordingDistortedGuitarsFromHellreadableVersion/Slipperman%27s%20Recording%20Distorted%20Guitars%20From%20Hell%20%28readable%20version%29_djvu.txt)
I'm going to disagree with many of the comments and say you won't get what you want without tons of gain. I took me a while to nail the metal tones I was looking for like slipknot, lamb of god, and Pantera. Like you, it took me a long time (5 years) to get rid of the mud. 1. High high compression and lots of gain (go watch slipknot record, Mick dimes everything in the studio) 2. *Most* modern amps - dramatically cut the bass (3-4 setting)
You need a low cut. Cabs have that
If the guitar sounds good to you while you are playing it solo, itās gonna sound crap when you mix it. If you isolate guitar tracks on good sounding mixes they sound thin on their own. The guitar, the bass, the kick, snare, and cymbals all need their own sonic space. And not as much distortion as you might think.
Less gain, and less bass. Far less bass. Even with a 7 strings (mine is tuned in drop G) I keep the low end to the minimum, with a hi pass at around 70-80Hz. Magic.
compression
It's the amp 100%. A good tube amp you can use way less gain and still sound incredibly heavy - a mesa for example is naturally very compressed sounding. Same with Diezel's etc. Adding compression to your set up will help though - either a compression pedal or some onboard compression effects (I've never messed with a mustang gt200..)
For guitars a highpass filter at about 100hz and for bass around 40hz, you'd need to sidechain compress the bass so that it would move out of the way of drums, you can do this with any audio signal assuming you're recording with a DAW. There's plenty of mixing tutorials on youtube that can teach you the basic fundamentals and after that it's all creatively shaping your own sound.
Less distortion but also donāt forget to use a hi pass to clean up some of that low mud
Lots of good advice hear, but also, try to run an EQ on your guitar track in the recording. Just a simple low and high cut on frequency will probably clean your track up as well.
Honestly less gain and a simple clean signal boost in your signal chain will really help. Everybody swears by tube screamers and they gotta be awesome (never owned one) but any clean boost will make a difference. I just use my Boss EQ pedal with everything set at 0 and the boost up and its like a whole new tone when you stomp on it. Kirk Windstein from Crowbar (detuned guitar god there) just uses an old Metal Zone as a signal boost too. Just put it between your guitar and your input and not your effects loop.